


Three Cups of Cocoa

by Akumeoi



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Backstory, Christmas Fluff, Cooking, First Kiss, Fluff, Gen, Holiday Fic Exchange, Holidays, Hot Chocolate, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-15 00:18:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13019271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akumeoi/pseuds/Akumeoi
Summary: While Hunk tries to replicate one of his favourite holiday cooking traditions in the kitchen of the Castle of Lions, he tells Lance some stories from his childhood... and then says something dumb, but it turns out okay.





	Three Cups of Cocoa

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HedonistInk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HedonistInk/gifts).



> This was written for InterdictedInk as part of the VLD winter exchange on tumblr. I chose to fill their prompts for Hunk, Hance, fluff, holiday specific, winter festival, and first kiss. 
> 
> EDIT: InterdictedInk is a punk bitch who don't know how to act. They have yet to acknowledge this fic in any way, shape, or form. Like bruh, you couldn't even drop me a kudos? That's fuckin lame, my man.
> 
> Beta'd by [revasnaslan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Revasnaslan/pseuds/Revasnaslan). Thank you!
> 
> "Tina" is the Samoan word for mother and grandmother. Hunk uses it to refer to his mother's mother. Originally I was going to go way into his backstory in this fic, but I think it's long enough already ^^; Just know that I based what I did include on the fact that there was a wave of Samoan immigrants to California in the 70s according to Wikipedia. So Hunk grew up exclusively in California, but living with his grandmother means he would've learnt a lot about his cultural heritage as he was growing up. I also learnt a lot of interesting things about Samoa when I was doing research for this fic! If you see any cultural inaccuracies, please let me know. I aim to be respectful!!
> 
> Recipes: [matcha hot chocolate](https://spoonuniversity.com/recipe/matcha-version-of-hot-chocolate) • [nutella hot chocolate](http://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/nutella-hot-chocolate-74086#activity-feed%20)  
> That “cooking is the purest form of love” quote comes from Jacques Pepin. I overheard it on the radio as I was working on this fic.
> 
> [Read on tumblr](https://a-still-small-vox.tumblr.com/post/168931905366/three-cups-of-cocoa).  
> Comments always welcome!

Intricate paper snowflakes decorated the halls, the bridge, and the paladins’ common room in the Castle of Lions. Decorative chains made of any extra paper scraps the paladins could get their hands on had been hung, and tinsel as well. There was no fireplace, but the paladins had each hung their most colourful socks outside their doors, much to Coran and Allura’s confusion. A thirty minute explanation had not seemed to do much to dispel this confusion, but nevertheless, the two Alteans had hung socks of their own outside their doors to honour the paladins’ holiday spirit.

The holy grail of winter decorations, the Christmas tree, stood in the corner of the paladins’ common room. The tree was not a real pine tree, of course, but a similar-looking type of tree with sturdy branches, a vague cone shape, and dark green needles; they had picked it up from a nearby planet a couple of days ago. The tips of the needles and the buds on the bark naturally glowed yellow at night, negating the need for fairy lights. Keith had complained that something called a “Christmas” tree was unnecessary, but Pidge had retorted that “even atheists can have fun putting shiny stuff on a pine tree.” Keith had eventually relented and even seemed to have a little fun making decorations for the tree along with everyone else.

Allura had especially enjoyed cutting out intricate silver paper snowflakes. Pidge and Lance had begged Allura to let them programme holographic snow falling on the bridge, but she had insisted it could be a dangerous distraction in the event of a fight or a skirmish with Zarkon’s forces. So instead, they had programmed a winter scene in Kaltenecker’s pasture, complete with a real red Santa hat for the cow herself, sewn painstakingly by Shiro and held on by an elastic strap.

And amidst all the festive chaos, Hunk was still down in the castle’s kitchens, baking up a storm. Some recipes from home were easy to replicate with the ingredients available to him in the Castle of Lions. By now, it was second nature to replace wheat flour with golden Laraxian grain flour, or white sugar with Sarisi _nagrith_. Making Christmas cookies with these ingredients had been a snap. But tonight, Hunk was focusing on a project that was turning out to be a little more difficult than he had originally anticipated: the perfect cup of hot chocolate.

Everything he needed had been laid out on the counter. Six cups, for taste testing. Saucepans, three of them. Measuring spoons. Measuring cups. A measuring jug. A cheese grater. Powdered bark from two different kinds of alien trees as intended substitutes for cocoa powder. Regular bark from the _virzor_ tree, which tasted of chocolate. Six different forms of nuts that all tasted almost like hazelnut, but not quite. Alien spices. _Nagrith_ , and the syrup made from it. Something called _ignli_ which was kinda like a chewy slab of chocolate matcha, but blue. Some simple food colouring. Space marshmallows. Hunk was aligning the spoons perfectly in a line beside each other when the kitchen door roughly slid open.

Hunk looked up. First to enter the kitchen was a full bucket of milk, wobbling precariously yet somehow not spilling, two arms wrapped tightly around it. Then came the rest of Lance, who was scowling in concentration, his eyes fixed on the precious cargo he was clutching. The door slid shut behind him. Hunk, who had risen uncertainly as the door opened, immediately rushed towards Lance with arms outstretched. 

“Here, let me help you with that,” Hunk said, putting one hand underneath the bucket and sliding it onto the counter with Lance, without spilling a drop. Lance let out an exaggerated huff of relief.

“Kaltenecker really outdid herself this time,” Lance said proudly, patting the side of the bucket. Kaltenecker had been outdoing herself all week, actually, what with the constant baking. In Hunk’s opinion, space milk was alright, but nothing could beat a glass of Kaltenecker’s fresh milk. There was no way Hunk would use any lesser ingredients for a project as important as hot chocolate.

“I’ll bring her some space pumpkin when we’re done here,” Hunk replied to Lance, who lit up.

“Ooh, I wanna feed her,” he said as Hunk slid the bucket of milk along the counter until it was lined up with the first saucepan. “Can I? You can make it part of my salary.”

Lance’s current salary had been agreed upon at the beginning of the week when Hunk had asked Lance if he’d be willing to milk Kaltenecker twice a day instead of once. It consisted of first taste tests for everything Hunk made. Hunk shrugged. “Sure, you can give her the space pumpkin,” he said, grinning a little at Lance’s enthusiasm.

“Sweet!” Lance pumped his fist in the air. He came around to the business side of the counter and peered over Hunk’s shoulder.

“Need a sous-chef?” Lance said nonchalantly.

“Um… I think, I think I got this,” Hunk said, remembering how Lance’s attempt to help him make profiteroles had gone earlier in the week. Actually, Hunk enjoyed teaching Lance how to mix, measure, and work with ingredients. The profiteroles hadn’t been edible, it was true, but Lance had this lively personality that just lit up the kitchen. Even with failed choux pastry and cream all over their hands, they’d both been laughing at the end of the day, unusual for Hunk when he failed a recipe.

But this recipe was special. He _had_ to get it right.

Still, Lance looked a little discouraged by what Hunk had said. He backed away slightly, looking as if he might be about to start for the door.

“Oh, okay,” Lance was already saying, but Hunk quickly interrupted him.

“But I’d love some company, if you want to hang out with me…” he said tentatively.

“Oh! Okay,” Lance said, in a much brighter tone than before. “Cool, so I’ll just sit on this counter and watch.” He hopped up onto the counter, just after the join where it wrapped around towards the stove.

“Sounds good to me,” Hunk said, flashing him a grin before moving to preheat the stove. Then he grabbed a measuring jug to divide Kaltenecker’s bounty into three separate portions, as Lance curiously inspected his ingredients.

“What is this cheese grater for?” Lance laughed. “I don’t see any cheese.”

“Oh, that’s for the – this stuff,” Hunk said, pointing to the _ignli_ , which he hadn’t figured out how to pronounce.

“Aren’t we just making cocoa?” Lance asked, leaning forward as Hunk set the measuring jug back down on the counter. “And what’s the deal with that, anyway? Is cocoa, like, important or something?”

Hunk paused. “It’s a long story,” he said after a moment. “Are you sure you want to hear the whole thing?”

“Yeah, totally,” Lance said, leaning forward again in interest. “Give me the goods.”

“Well…” Hunk said, his hands beginning to automatically measure out his assembled ingredients, “it was the first time my mom let me use the stove…”

For as long as he could remember, Hunk’s grandma had been in the kitchen, cooking food for the family, for the local homeless shelter, for their friends, and for anyone she could think of who might need some good home cooking. While Hunk’s parents worked, his Tina stayed home, taking care of him and cooking to pass the time. For his Tina, cooking was both a hobby and an art. “Cooking is the purest expression of love,” she would say, “because you’re always cooking for somebody else.”

And Hunk, who loved his Tina, would always ask if he could help her with whatever dish she was making. It was from her that he learnt all of his basic cooking skills, as well as how to alter recipes depending on the ingredients they had on hand, or how to experiment with a recipe until he got exactly the result he wanted. His parents were pleased that he spent so much time with his Tina, but they were also hesitant to let him use sharp knives, the oven, or the stovetop.

It was the winter of his last year in elementary school when the Californian weather gods smiled on him, and graced him with a snow day. That day, his Tina had asked in a conspiratorial tone if he wanted to learn to use the stovetop. Hunk didn’t know why she had chosen to start with hot chocolate, but he figured maybe it was because it was easy, quick, and pretty difficult to mess up. Like a test run to make sure he had the attention and awareness to make anything without burning himself on a hotplate. After they had successfully made and drunk two steaming cups of hot chocolate, they had spent the rest of the day making coconut Christmas cookies together. Those weren’t the only things that Hunk had learnt to make that winter, but it was one of the things that had stuck with him the longest.

“Aww, so it reminds you of your grandma?” Lance said as Hunk finished speaking. He had interrupted multiple times throughout the story to ask questions, but Hunk didn’t mind. By now the first batch of hot chocolate he was making was reaching a smooth brown consistency – almost done.

“It reminds me of a lot of things,” Hunk explained, stirring the pot. “Being a kid. Winter. My Tina. Every year after she taught me, we’d make it whenever we had our first snow day. I insisted.”

He smiled at the memory, then leaned over the pot to give it a little sniff and see if it was done. Unfortunately, his chef’s senses warned him that something was off about his concoction. The texture wasn’t quite right, and the smell had hints of bitterness in it that weren’t supposed to be there. Nevertheless, it was finished, and so it was time for a taste test.

“This is going to be terrible,” Hunk moaned, as he poured the hot chocolate into the first of the two mugs waiting on the counter.

“Yeah, really terrible,” Lance said, sliding down the counter to snag his mug. Hunk looked up suspiciously. “So terrible,” Lance continued, “that I’ll have to drink all of it by myself so that nobody else has to suffer.”

Laughing, Hunk picked up his mug and gave Lance a little nod. “Cheers,” he said, taking a few sample sips of the hot chocolate, while Lance took a big gulp.

“Blech. It actually _is_ terrible,” Lance said, sticking his tongue out and making a face. Unfortunately, Hunk had to agree with him. The _virzor_ bark was a total bust. It hadn’t reacted to hot milk or the other ingredients well at all. Better try some of his other options instead.

“Ugh, yeah,” Hunk said, taking Lance’s mug from his hand before he could taste any more of Hunk’s failure. He dumped both mugs in the sink and then left them there to deal with later. “Sorry you had to taste that,” Hunk added, shivering a little as he caught a bitter aftertaste at the back of his throat.

“Hey, no big. That’s why we got a whole bucket of milk, right?” Lance said, hopping up onto the counter again. “I’m sure you’ll have the recipe fixed up in no time.”

A whole bucket had seemed like a lot when they started, but now didn’t seem like very many when they only had two out of three portions left. Hunk wouldn’t mind having to do this whole experiment again – cooking was his passion, after all – but he didn’t want Lance to leave the kitchen disappointed tonight. He could not mess this up. Not hot chocolate. Not when it was for Lance.

Hunk sighed, retrieving the bucket from the end of the counter to measure out the second portion of milk.

“Hey, buddy… you know it’s gonna be fine, right?” Lance said, peering at him in concern.

Hunk didn’t look up from the milk he was pouring, but the set of his shoulders eased slightly. “Yeah, thanks, Lance,” he said. Anyone who thought Lance was insensitive evidently hadn’t spent a lot of one-on-one time with him. “Actually, there’s more to the hot chocolate story, if you want to hear it.”

“Heck yeah I do,” Lance said, sitting back and crossing his arms. “This is just getting good. You never talk about home, I mean Earth home. I wanna hear all the juicy details.”

“Okay, so the next part of the story is from when I was in high school…”

A sophomore in high school, to be precise. That year, Hunk had met a girl who had the same lunch period as him but wasn’t in any of his classes, who claimed to be a baker. She often brought pastries to school for her friends, and everyone talked about how good they were – so, naturally, Hunk hated her guts. Really, he was jealous of the attention she got for her cooking, when nobody but Hunk’s friends seemed to care about his. He never even thought of talking to her, until one day, she overheard him quietly complaining about her popularity, and challenged him to a cook-off – and she let him choose the food they were competing to make.

Hunk considered challenging her to make one of his Tina’s Samoan-infused recipes, but since most of the stuff she made was French or Italian, that would’ve been too obvious a way to give himself an advantage. Besides, Hunk believed he could beat her without an artifice – even at 15, he was confident in his skills. Thinking he was being clever, Hunk challenged her to make a simple cup of hot chocolate, and she accepted the challenge. By this time, Hunk had experimented with a variety of different recipes, from peppermint hot chocolate to hazelnut. For the cook-off, he made peppermint Nutella hot chocolate. 

The next week they both returned to school with big thermoses of hot chocolate for their five taste testers to try. When Hunk tasted hers, he was totally blown away – she was actually good. She had invented a recipe for hot chocolate infused with Japanese matcha. He couldn’t believe it, but after having tasted her cooking for himself and seen how good it was, Hunk knew he couldn’t truly hate a chef as talented as her.

“So just like that, we became friends. And she invited me over to cook with her all the time. And guess what?” Hunk said.

“What?” Lance asked.

“This recipe I’m making right now, or trying to make, I guess, is actually a super special secret blend of _both_ of our recipes. Mine, that Tina and I worked on together, and hers, that she just made up from recipes she found on the internet to beat me in the contest,” Hunk said. “We took out the peppermint and kept the hazelnut and matcha. And on that note, this batch is done!” Hunk announced, taking it off the heat to fill up the second pair of mugs on the counter. He was feeling a little more confident about this batch. The scent and the texture seemed more familiar, although the colour was slightly tinged blue. But it was never easy to judge food by its colour in space anyway.

“Aww, yeah, smells awesome,” Lance said, taking his mug. They clinked mugs before drinking this time.

“Hey, this isn’t half bad,” Lance commented after taking a cautious swallow. He took a few more gulps, as Hunk savoured the taste in his mouth and tried to pinpoint exactly what about it needed to be changed. The balance of matcha to hazelnut was off – more matcha, maybe? The pleased look on Lance’s face as he took another few swallows from his mug was one of the best things Hunk had ever seen, probably. He couldn’t wait until Lance tasted the actual finished product.

After a few more sips, Hunk decided that the hot chocolate recipe definitely needed more _ignli_ , or space matcha. That meant more time with the cheese grater. After Hunk had put his and Lance’s cups, and the used saucepan into the sink, he retrieved the final portion of milk to begin the final batch of hot chocolate. But Lance was being uncharacteristically quiet. Had Hunk said something bad? Or maybe Lance was just tired, although it wasn’t really that late. Hunk wasn’t sure if he should say something or just let it go. He knew he’d feel dumb if he started rambling, but he couldn’t really help it.

Just as he was opening his mouth to try and start up another conversation, Lance took a deep breath and said, “So.”

“Sooo?” Hunk said, mimicking Lance’s drawn-out tone.

“So,” Lance said again, leaning back casually and smirking. “Did you _like_ her?”

“Her? Who? Oh, my chef friend from high school,” Hunk said, thinking maybe he understood where Lance was coming from now. Every time Hunk seemed interested in someone – it had happened with Shay, too – Lance immediately wanted to know if Hunk had a crush on them or not. At first, Hunk had thought Lance was just being his normal, playful self. Now… he didn’t know how to tell Lance that he didn’t have any competition.

“Don’t play games with me,” Lance said teasingly. “You know exactly who I mean, hmm?”

Hunk shook his head, and laughed wryly. “Nah, I didn’t have a crush on her. She was my best friend in high school, but at the time I met her, I was already head over heels for this guy on the basketball team who was in my English class. He was a total jock, I should’ve known it would never work out.”

“Ha,” Lance laughed, “Sounds like me in high school too. Crushing on all the wrong girls. And… guys too.” His gaze slid to Hunk, who looked away a beat too late, feeling his cheeks flush.

“It was different at the Garrison, huh?” Hunk said after a moment, having finally finished grating the _ignli_. With a clean and practiced hand he slid it from the cutting board the grater was resting on into a measuring cup.

“Yeah,” Lance agreed quickly. “We weren’t even there for that long. Oh, man, there were some hot cadets in our year, though.”

“I dunno,” Hunk said. “It seemed like we were there and gone so fast. I barely had time to notice anything. I was just focused on learning how not to get airsick.”

Lance laughed. “Think we’ve both come a long way, haven’t we,” he said.

After that, the talk turned to a slightly safer subject as they both reminisced about the few months they had spent at the Galaxy Garrison. Lance made Hunk laugh by describing the rickety old flight simulator they had used, which was pathetically useless in comparison to the lions they piloted now. It seemed just a short time later that Hunk was watching the last of the ingredients melt into the milk bubbling in the saucepan, and then preparing to pour the final cups.

Both Lance and Hunk held their breath as Hunk set the empty pan beside the two full mugs on the counter.

“The moment of truth,” Hunk said nervously. The scent drifting to him on the steam rising from the cup smelled good. He thought he had done everything right. But if he hadn’t…

Sensing his nervousness again, Lance gave him a friendly nudge. “Drink up!” he said, raising his mug. Hunk hesitantly mirrored him, and then they both took a drink.

It was perfect. _Exactly_ how it was when Hunk made it at home. Maybe even better, the natural creaminess of the _ignli_ making the consistency just a little more smooth and rich.

“Hunk, you big culinary genius!” Lance exclaimed in delight. “I could just kiss you!”

“Okay, um, yeah, that’s a thing you could do, if you wanted to,” Hunk blurted out, his brain still on cooking autopilot. Then he realised what he had said, and froze.

“Um, I mean, if you like me, which you probably don’t, but that’s okay, because you were just joking,” he stuttered.

“No, no, I really wasn’t,” Lance said, sounding equally as embarrassed, his face completely red. Hunk felt like the steam from the hot chocolate was coming out of his ears. “I, um. I – you know what, just come here,” Lance continued.

And Lance pulled Hunk into a hazelnut-matcha flavoured kiss.


End file.
